READIT-2007 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

- Be aware of organizational level and aggregation, cultural issues and
reward systems, timeliness, sharing and value, legal process and
protection (patents, trade secrets, trade marks, NDAs)
The internal knowledge mapping in a public health organization allows it to
learn what it knows. It refers to the understanding and self awareness that an
organization has with respect to its knowledge resources and their limitations. Internal
knowledge is especially important because it is unique, specific to the organization,
tacit and therefore difficult to reproduce by knowledge holders located outside the
organization. On the other hand, external knowledge acquisition refers to a capability
for external awareness, more specifically to the capacity for identifying and acquiring
knowledge from external sources and making it suitable for subsequent use by the
organization. Knowledge mapping and acquisition involve many specific capacities
for example, locating, accessing, valuing, and filtering pertinent knowledge,
extracting, collecting, distilling, refining, interpreting, packaging, and transforming
the captured knowledge into usable knowledge; and transferring the usable knowledge
within the organization for subsequent use in the problem solving. External
knowledge may provide new ideas and contexts for benchmarking internal
knowledge; this type of knowledge is more explicit and more costly to acquire but it
is easily available from other similar public health organizations.
With the help of results of the knowledge mapping we can look into the
knowledge gap that may exist between what a public health organization has to know
to implement its mandates and what it currently knows and this information leads to
one of three conclusions: 1. The organization has external knowledge gap if it does
not know enough to implements its public health mandate; 2. The organization has
external knowledge gap if it knows less than what other public health organization
know in order to implement similar mandate; 3. The organization has knowledge gap
it knows enough to implement its mandate or if it knows more than other public
health organizations know in order to implement similar mandates.
Knowledge mapping may rely on one of four organizational modes:
undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search and formal search. In
undirected viewing, a public health professional is exposed to information, when he or
she has no specific informational needs in mind. We can say this is an informal
strategy that can be useful for the early detection of emerging problems. In
conditioned viewing a public health professional directs his or her viewing on
information regarding selected public health topics or issues. During the informal
search process, a public health professional looks for information that will improve
his or her understanding of a specific public health issue. Finally, in a formal search a
public health professional engages in a systematic search for ideas, information and
knowledge about a specific health issue. This last mode includes conducting
systematic reviews and external surveys as well as training and hiring employees (in
order to bring knowledge into the organization).
Knowledge creation is usually associated with research and development
activities. Knowledge translation capability refers to the capacity to combine
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